Starting the Tech Ideas Sub-Blog with something that I came across in the past week. Yes, pretty random, but do expect all posts under this category to be very random & at times very brief. I would like to use this forum more to convey these ideas to the people who are actually creating these platforms and/or to debate over whether it is a viable option to go forward with, or if something like this already exists.

I didn’t use Gmail much before – only accessing the mails through desktop email clients, but since now my company email is hosted with Google, I’m using Gmail quite a lot for the past few weeks. While writing/sending/receiving mails is very easy I kind of miss not having a Notes section (Outlook has one). Though one could use the Google Drive to write down texts which one randomly comes up with – but the ease of adding a note just there is one feature which could be great for Gmail.

How many times have you thought that this email needs to be followed up & you type in your notes pertaining to your follow up in your diary or probably planner ? Many times I would say for people who have to screen through SO many mails in a day – which at times are a huge mix of important, urgent & personal ! And though there are options like the Evernote – where you can readily write notes and then arrange them by categories, but then that takes one to a different application ecosystem – transition to which might even cause the thought to vanish off – or probably one might want to skip the labour of opening yet another application for something that one should have essentially used the human memory for ! [ (1) Yes there are people SO lazy – me for example ! :P (2) Given the crazy lifestyle & information overload nowadays, it has become impossible to remember each & every thought that one might come up with – the reason many still carry a small pocket notebook with them.]

What I suggest is having a Notes section in Gmail, something ingrained in the same panel just like the Chat feature. So when you want to add a note, you just click on “Add Note” option on the sidebar and a pop up window or a modal/modeless box opens, enabling the user to write the note & save it. It can also be a tray element in the bottom (like the tasks box in Gmail) – so that when one thinks of referring back to it or editing it – it becomes easy to access it.

Further, it would be great if Google can give us an option of connecting a Note to an Email. In the sense, a brief note to remind anything pertaining to the mail. So when we are reading the mail, we can actually just click on the “Add Note” button (somewhere near the “Send” button of the mail) and add a quick note, something which mentions any prompt thought you had in regards to that mail. This note remains with you & is not visible to anybody else that the mail is marked to or the person it came from – so you can very easily write down anything – from mail observations to event planning – anything in the prompt Note ! Something which will also help you in remembering an important discussion even after months of receiving that mail. Now this feature is not there in Outlook also, or any other mail client I’ve used till now, so that’s a good marketing feature for Gmail ! (Do guide me if there’s one which I never came across ! :P )

All these notes can then also be visible from a Notes section – all notes including the ones connected to the emails. With the option of categories/tags it would also make it easy for us to sort the notes under various different labels – another for-reference technique for later connect.

So how do you find the idea ? Is there something like this already there ? Worth a try ? Do forward to a Gmail developer so that it’s use can be seen ! ;)

And till I come up with yet another post under this category – bon appetit – pertaining to an appetite for ideas ! :D